


What we see is no surprise

by disappointionist



Category: Game Grumps
Genre: Angst, Getting Back Together, M/M, minor swearing/cursing, post-breakup fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2016-06-09
Packaged: 2018-07-14 01:55:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7147361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disappointionist/pseuds/disappointionist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They have both agreed that they're over, still Dan can't help but let Arin in when he comes knocking on his door in the middle of the night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What we see is no surprise

Dan’s phone rings, blaring the familiar tune of Chaka Khan’s ‘Ain’t nobody’. He really should change it, but he hasn’t heard it in weeks, didn’t even think about it until now. How it could potentially hurt him to hear in a bedroom only lit by the alarm clock reading 2:34 AM.

2:34 AM. He shouldn’t be answering this, but his hand goes to the damn phone anyway and he unlocks it, taking the call. Dan would like to blame reflexes, but he can’t.

“Hey,” he says. He settles the phone against the pillow and tries to prop it up against his ear. “Is everything alright?”

At first the only reply is a non-committal noise which Dan isn’t clear on the meaning of. It is followed by a shaky sigh which makes Dan’s chest feel even tighter.

”Are you up?” Arin asks, voice raspy.  

Needing to do something with his hands, Dan grabs his phone tightly as he sits up, a small flare of dread in his stomach.  
”Now I am,” he says, drawing his legs up toward his chest.

”Will you let me in?”

Dan’s body goes cold, a freezing surge that spreads from his toes up to his shoulders. Arin. Right there. At Dan’s apartment in the middle of the night.

“Yeah,” he whispers, though he can’t manage to even move off the bed for another thirty seconds.

 

As he finally reaches the front door and unlatches it, Dan’s not entirely sure whether or not he wants Arin to still be there or have bailed on him. His phone is still in his hand but it hangs along his side, swinging against his pajama bottoms.

“Arin,” it’s intended as a beckoning, but comes out more as a statement.

Arin looks very tired, and he’s still holding his phone to his ear.  
“I’m sorry,” he says, and the sound travels to Dan from two directions. Arin looks down at Dan’s hand, before realizing that he’s still on the phone and hanging up.

Dan doesn’t say it’s alright, because he’s not sure that it is. Instead he just steps aside to let Arin into the hallway. Without looking back, he walks into the kitchen to heat up some water for tea. It’s some kind of purpose, something that doesn’t make him entirely phased by Arin at half past two in the night. When he turns around, Arin is sitting by the small kitchen island, shoving something around on top it. Dan frowns, but doesn’t ask. It was always the best to just wait Arin out. Whatever was said or happened after that, happened in time.

Proceeding to make tea, he locates two clean mugs, picks out the first box he finds that says decaf and pours the hot water. While the tea steeps, he brings it over to the kitchen island and shoves one mug across the surface to Arin. Arin smiles, tentative but grateful.

Dan himself stays standing on the opposite side, holding his tea up as if to drink it, even though it’s neither strong nor cool enough to even sip yet.

 

“So, I found some of your stuff over at mine, and I thought I’d pack it up.” Arin begins. Dan sips his tea and burns his tongue. “And I know it was the wrong thing to do, but these were addressed to me,” with a sharp inhale, as if he ran out of breath speaking, Arin taps the papers in front of him.

As Dan looks down at the sheets of paper, so unfamiliar without their envelopes, he feels the burn of the tea all the way down his throat. He can’t even manage to nod, it hurts to move his head even that much.

“I realized, after a while that maybe they weren’t intended for me at all, or for a future me, certainly not the me that read them… But I couldn’t stop, I felt like I was drowning and I got to the last one and it was dated three weeks ago like, the day _before_ , and I couldn’t…”

Arin wraps both his hands around his mug of tea, letting the letters slip underneath his arm as he draws it toward himself. He meets Dan’s eyes for the first time since he had started talking. Dan wants to look away but can’t, so he sets down his mug blindly, hoping it won’t fall off the edge and burn his bare feet because of it.

“Why did we break up?” Arin asks after another long pause.

Dan is somehow relieved, because this is one question he’s had time to figure out the answer to.  
“Because it’s hard as fuck, because it wasn’t all good all of the time… because on some days we were so worn out one would have thought we’d been in a fucking warzone,” his voice is raspy, but he gets it out past his burned mouth and swollen tongue.

“Yeah,” Arin says, and his face twists into something pained for just a second before relaxing. His eyes almost warm when they meet Dan’s. “But it was _our_ warzone.”

 

There is at least five hundred replies in Dan’s head, but none of them seem like the right one _. Why are we doing this now? I’ve gotten terrible at breathing when you’re not around me.  I thought we talked it out before the end and then a billion times more in my head. Some soldiers miss war too, that doesn’t mean that it’s good._ He tries to focus on trying out the temperature of his tea, pressing his fingertips to the mug. He swallows, his throat swelling and dry at once.

“But you know why,” he says at last. Because while he knows assuming anything about Arin’s thoughts is a downward spiral, there is no way that Arin hasn’t tried to figure that one out as much as Dan himself has.

“Dan, these things you said in here…” Arin trails off and the paper is crumpling underneath his fingers. “I feel all of that too. I get jealous as all hell, I get angry, I feel insufficient and little. But I fucking love you. And there have been times when I have woken up screaming this past week because I can only just barely stand life without you.”

Dan thinks that it might be a slip and that any moment Arin is going to notice. But Arin doesn’t backtrack to change the tense of his words and Dan suddenly cannot breathe.

“Look,” Arin’s voice is a lot softer. “I know we said we’d give it time and then go back to working with each other again, but I need you. I need you now, even if it will be hard for me not to… you know. But I will do that. If you want to please, _please_ be in my life again.”

“Is that… Is that all you want?” Dan asks, and he looks at the way his hand is resting on top the counter. He doesn’t realize that he’s wishing for Arin to touch him until the younger man reaches out to rest two fingers against the back of his hand.

“Dan,” Arin says, sounding broken enough for Dan not to want to look up. “You know I can’t answer that correctly. Either way I will scare you and I’m tired of doing that.”

“I meant every word,” Dan says with a deep sigh. “In those letters. But particularly I meant the ones I wrote last. I’d fucking walk across the world if it meant it would be okay for me to marry you and have twenty-five snotty kids, I’d do both terrible and ridiculous things for you but I won’t…”

“Do that?” Arin sings, and Dan can’t help but laugh when he meets Arin’s eyes.

Then he shakes his head. “I’m not sure I can mute out the constant worry of this exact same thing happening again,” Dan says.

Arin tugs at his wrist and Dan allows himself to be dragged a few steps along the side of the kitchen island.

“We’re currently open for negotiation,” Arin says quietly, lifting Dan’s wrist to his lips and pressing a kiss against it before letting it drop.

“Thank you,” Dan whispers, leaning down to press the bridge of his nose against the top of Arin’s head. “Is it too much too soon to ask you to stay with me tonight?”

Arin nods slowly in reply, but he slides off the bar stool and wraps his hand around Dan’s right arm.

 

They walk into the bedroom, even after Dan stops for a moment in the door to the living room, giving Arin an easier opportunity. Though they did their fair share of sleeping and fucking and lovemaking on the couch, it’s not surrounded by the layers and layers of built up tension and intimacy like what is encapsulated by Dan’s blue bedroom walls. 

There is familiarity in their movements, a flow to how they move through the room to the bed, Arin holding the covers up for Dan to crawl in first before spooning up behind him.

“You’re going to get really warm,” Dan points out. He feels Arin jerk in what he assumes is a shrug, but he also feels the irregular huffs of breath that come with Arin smiling.

“Or really hot,” he says.

“I didn’t even give you the opportunity for that one, Ar.”

“I like to create my own,” Arin replies, resting his forehead against the back of Dan’s neck.

For a long while they’re just lying still, Dan in quiet, stunned surprise at how easy his breathing paces with Arin’s, how easy their bodies fit together like this, how much it doesn’t hurt when perhaps it should.

“Ain’t nobody,” Dan whispers into the darkness, into the space surrounding them.  
He thinks that tomorrow, he might regret that he didn’t change his ringtone, that he opened the door, that he wrote letters that bared the very depths of himself and that he caved enough to ask Arin to stay. But as for now, he feels warm and comfortable, and his breathing is easy. 

It’s so quiet that Dan almost doesn’t catch the sleepily breathed “Never,” that falls from Arin’s lips and settles against the skin on the back of his neck.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted on my grumps-tumblr damnavidans, based on the following prompt: "i found your box of letters underneath my bed last night and because i’m a nosy motherfucker i decided to read them and it turns out they were all addressed to me and the last one was dated the day you moved out and i’m not quite sure why i thought this would be a good idea but here i am, standing on your doorstep, wondering why the fuck we’re not together anymore".


End file.
